The Virtual Army Experience (VAE) is a mobile US Army simulator created by the Army development team with the digital development handled by Zombie Studios. The interactive exhibit brings the Army’s popular computer game, America’s Army: Special Forces (Overmatch), to a life-size, networked environment to provide visitors with a limited test drive of soldiering. Utilizing a complex set-up of computers, LAN based scenarios, motion simulators, and videos, the VAE is a massive display of technological invention. The VAE was greeted with enthusiasm by the public and the experiential marketing community for its innovative design, use of advanced measurement technology, and its ability to engage visitors through an immersive, entertaining and educational experience. The Army's use of storytelling, and virtual-reality techniques compares favorably with advanced experiences at several theme parks. The dual use of the virtual environment with tracking technology is a potent combination that commercial marketers could learn from, say experts, especially those marketers who target young adults.
The VAE is managed by the Army’s Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA) at the United States Military Academy, West Point. OEMA director Colonel Casey Wardynski is the originator of the Army Game Project. The Army spent about $9 million building four versions of the Virtual Army Experience, Col. Wardynski said. He recognized that the appetite of young Americans for electronic entertainment was growing faster than their interest in television and other forms of traditional media. According to Nielsen, three out of four residences with males under 34 have a game system. Col. Wardynski envisioned "using computer game technology to provide the public a virtual soldier experience that was engaging, informative and entertaining."
Read more about Virtual Army Experience: Overview, Exhibit Details, The Experience, Academic References, VAE General Facts, Accolades
Famous quotes containing the words virtual, army and/or experience:
“Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune—what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)
“He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co- ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, “Give me the co-ordinates.”... The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog!”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)